Her comments come after a new transport select committee report released on Monday (25 April) savaged the government’s treatment of travel – claiming the sector had been "singled out" and that restrictions throughout the pandemic were “disproportionate and inconsistent”.
MPs demanded ministers now take steps to “future-proof” the aviation sector by incorporating any future pandemic resilience planning “to provide travellers and the industry with predictability and transparency”.
Lo Bue-Said said the challenges facing the industry “are being felt far and wide” by many types of companies after they had no choice but to halt trading, repatriate thousands of travellers and cut costs to protect their businesses for the future.
The government lifted all Covid-related travel measures from UK arrivals on 18 March, Lo Bue-Said said that although it was not the government’s responsibility to rebuild the travel sector, it must recognise its significance, especially the importance of the outbound industry.
“It takes much longer than six weeks to rebuild an entire industry,” she said. “It takes even longer to build the image for outbound travel as a vibrant sector anyone would want to be reemployed into, and it takes much more than a busy Easter weekend to rebuild businesses.”
Travel businesses, she stressed, “are not faceless companies, and not just aviation” but behind each company “there are real people, exhausted, exasperated, and all they want to do is get back to working in an industry they love”.
Outbound travel should be recognised as a business sector in its own right, Lo Bue-Said insisted, with its breadth of product, “unique financial protection” afforded to consumers and economic potential for UK jobs celebrated.
Government should also respect the role outbound travel can play for "global Britain" and its help in supporting the delivery of sustainability goals, she said.
“Now is not the time to put the industry under the bus with attention-grabbing headlines, but to recognise the detrimental impact unnecessary restrictions had on an entire eco system and what it is going to take to regenerate the industry,” added Lo Bue-Said.
